News and updates about Information Technology at Harvey Mudd College

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We had such a busy Fall semester that I was unable to send out updates. In this one, I will cover developments since my last update in late August. I hope you have some time to read it.

People
Starting with the most important aspect of all organizations, I have the pleasure of introducing three people. Taylor Calderone has joined us in a permanent position as a technical analyst on the User Support team. Taylor has been with us for a while on a temporary basis, working primarily with audiovisual support. When Corey LeBlanc left for Pomona’s Computer Science department, it was really great to see Taylor compete for and win the permanent position.

Brian Reid has joined us in a temporary capacity to work on the User Support team. Brian came to HMC from the Geek Squad, and we are very happy to welcome him to the campus.

I am also very happy to announce that our Senior Network Engineer search has finally yielded fruit. Duke Vu joined the CIS team on January 5th. He comes to us after a five year stint at JPL and we are really looking forward to adding his set of skills and insights to the team that works on that most fundamental of things, our network. Duke will report to Mitch Shacklett, Director of the Systems and Network Group.

ITC
The intercollegiate Information Technology Committee (ITC) has been very active of late. This year, I get to co-chair the committee with Ken Pflueger of Pomona. Among the topics we are dealing with is the IT Assesssment by BerryDunn, which I mentioned in my last update. The final version has been received and is under review by both the ITC and the Presidents Council. The ITC agreed with many of its recommendations and has started to lay the groundwork to implement some of them. The Council discussed the report at their January 2015 retreat and ITC is meeting with Council in March. Council has urged the IT leaders to collaborate more deeply in order to build strong centralized services where appropriate, in particular in areas like networking, data centers, security, identity and access management and disaster recovery.

Related to the ITC, I have been helping out at CUC since the late Fall departure of the previous CIO. I am assisting Stig Lanesskog, the CEO of CUC, with IT decision making and keeping the department moving while they redefine the CIO position and launch a search. It is an honor and privilege to help the consortium in this way, and will, I believe, yield benefit for HMC in the long run.

Last year, the intercollegiate Budget and Financial Affairs Committee (BFAC) began looking for a replacement for the aging Datatel financial system that is run by the Claremont University Consortium (CUC). The BFAC narrowed its requirements down to four or five “show stoppers”, two of which will be of great interest to our faculty. The first was the ability easily to report across fiscal years, which is often very important to grant holders. And the second was support for all modern browsers. (You read more about their philosophy on user interface design).

Password Policy
Password Policy: As you know by now, we did not implement the system change we had announced for October 27th, which would have required you to change your password every 365 days. Thanks to good feedback from the community and the Computing Committee, I went back to the drawing board, connected with our financial auditors and finally we worked out an agreement that will require slightly longer passwords, but no annual changing of passwords. Once per year, you will be required to check your password to ensure that it meets the HMC Credentials password requirements (the timing of this check is up to you, based on when you last changed or checked your password). If your password meets the requirements, then you are good to go. Only if it doesn’t meet the requirements will you be required to change it.

Email aliases
joseph.vaughan@hmc.edu, jvaughan@hmc.edu, vaughan@hmc.edu, joseph_vaughan@hmc.edu which one am I? We have traditionally tried to anticipate what people might think was someone’s address by populating our “Mail Central” with a number of aliases for the main address, which is always of the form username@hmc.edu. During the Fall semester we reviewed a number of issues with this system:

As the numbers in our community increase, it is more and more common to have name clashes, so that the underlying idea of being able to “make up” the email address if you know a person’s name is no longer valid.

Many systems now use email addresses as usernames, which means that they treat the different aliases as different accounts. We have a variation of that problem with the Footprints Ticket System.

All modern email systems have some form of directory lookup and autocomplete of addresses, so you don’t have to remember them.

With this in mind, we decided to stop creating aliases for email addresses and just use the canonical form username@hmc.edu. We did not touch existing aliases, but will no longer be creating them when we create accounts.

Other Topics
So this update has gotten long enough. But please visit our IT News site to read other articles:

As the table below makes clear, we are seeing a huge increase in the number of requests for CIS services in the Shanahan Center.

We are happy to have this “problem”, but we are having to work hard to make sure that we are delivering services as efficiently as possible.

To that end, we have reorganized within User Support to make sure that there more people available to provide audiovisual services. We have also made sure that every request goes into our ticket system and our calendar.

One of the best ways you can help us is to always request audiovisual support via our request form. Give us as much advance notice as you can and be as specific as you can about your needs.

We’d also love to hear your feedback about how audiovisual services could be streamlined even more. So send your ideas our way. Thanks!

There are a few NSF grant programs currently accepting proposals that have to do with cyberinfrastructure, including one for Network Design and Implementation for Small Institutions and another category for “Instrument Networking, which recognizes scientific instrumentation as key campus infrastructure components to promote requiring high-performance, advanced networking”.

Together with Los Nettos, our regional network organization, we plan to apply, and are anticipating a site visit from NSF personnel in the near future. All of the grants ask for examples of faculty who are either doing or are interested in doing work that involves moving large amounts of data or making use of high performance computing.

While Jeho Park has been in touch with several faculty, I wanted to send out a broad request. If you have interest, please let Jeho or me know. We are looking for examples of what people do or would do if they had access to the right resources — we’re not suggesting that you write a grant proposal yourself (unless you want to, of course). Here are some examples of the kind of work enabled by high speed networking, drawn from a recent Internet2 announcement about the University of Connecticut:

The Molecular and Cell Biology Department can transfer huge genome sequence reads produced by next-generation sequencers and the processed outputs within campus and with external sites.

The Physics Department can participate in the Open Science Grid, a global community of scientists, researchers, and experts in high-throughput computing, and regularly transfer terabytes of jobs to and from the grid within a day.

The Statistics Department can conduct research on high-dimensional statistical modeling and inference using large data sets produced by health and biomedical studies.

UConn Health can conduct research on quantitative cell biology and simulations as well as computational genomics that require terabytes of data transfer on a daily basis.

We are pleased to announce that a Mathematica seminar will be held on our campus (Aviation Room in Hoch-Shanahan) on Tuesday, February 24th, 2015 from noon to 1 pm. Please come join us to learn more about new Mathematica 10 features that can help your job done more easily and efficiently. Seats are limited, so please register for the seminar. Here’s the details:

This talk illustrates capabilities in Mathematica 10 and other Wolfram technologies that are directly applicable for use in teaching and research on campus. Topics of these technical talks include:

Enter calculations in everyday English, or using the flexible Wolfram Language

Visualize data, functions, surfaces, and more in 2D or 3D

Store and share documents locally or in the Wolfram Cloud

Use the Predictive Interface to get suggestions for the next useful calculation or function options

Access trillions of bits of on-demand data

Use semantic import to enrich your data using Wolfram curated data

Easily turn static examples into mouse-driven, dynamic applications

Access 10,000 free course-ready applications

Utilize the Wolfram Language’s wide scope of built-in functions, or create your own

Get deep support for specialized areas including machine learning, time series, image processing, parallelization, and control systems, with no add-ons required

Current users will benefit from seeing the many improvements and new features of Mathematica 10 and Wolfram Alpha Pro, but prior knowledge of the Wolfram Language is not required. All attendees will receive an electronic copy of the examples, which can be adapted to individual projects.

As I mentioned before, the Claremont Colleges have decided to participate in Workday’s Strategic Influencer program for the Workday Student product. This initiative is now taking more shape. The following people have been appointed to the Workday Strategic Influencer Project Team:

Margeret Adorno (Registrar, Pomona)

Mark Ashley (Registrar, HMC)

Andrew Dorantes (Treasurer, HMC)

Robert Goldstein (CIO, Pitzer)

Elizabeth Morgan (Registrar, Claremont McKenna)

Joseph Vaughan (CIO, HMC)

Chris Waugh, (Director, Smith Campus Center, Pomona)

The Project Team will visit Workday headquarters in Pleasanton, CA on February 24 for the first meeting of Strategic Influencers and Design Partners. These meetings will be broadcast so that you can listen in from home. Workday will be conducting interviews with functional groups as well. If you have views on what a Student System should do, now is the time to speak up!

Last year, the intercollegiate Budget and Financial Affairs Committee (BFAC) began looking for a replacement for the aging Datatel financial system that is run by the Claremont University Consortium (CUC). The BFAC narrowed its requirements down to four or five “show stoppers”, two of which will be of great interest to our faculty. The first was the ability easily to report across fiscal years, which is often very important to grant holders. And the second was support for all modern browsers. (You can read more about Workday’s philosophy on user interface design).

The BFAC and the consultant they worked with (a former treasurer at Scripps College) reviewed all the market leaders and finally settled on Workday, a relative newcomer with a strong pedigree (it was founded by the founder of Peoplesoft, Dave Duffield and the former chief strategist of Peoplesoft, Aneel Bhusri). The Presidents Council signed off on the BFAC choice in August and the target for implementation of the new system is July 1, 2015 (yes, 2015!).

One interesting aspect of this for me, as CIO of one of the participating Colleges, is that Workday is only offered as software as a service (SaaS): there is no on-premise version. We will not be making any local customizations. This is one more example of systems moving to the cloud, with all the implications that carries for IT units and for the Colleges.

Also extremely interesting from a Claremont perspective is that all of the Treasurers have agreed to “hold hands” and use one system, including changing and aligning business practices across the Colleges. This includes Pomona College returning to being on the same financial system as the other colleges.

A further related aspect of this is that Workday have begun developing Workday Student, a new student information system. They invited the Claremont Colleges to participate in the development of this system as “strategic influencers”. The intercollegiate Academic Deans Committee (ADC), Business and Financial Affairs Committee (BFAC) and Information Technology Committee (ITC) made a joint recommendation to the Council that we should take Workday up on their offer. But at the same time the committees recommended a market review of Student Information Systems, with a view to replacing Jenzabar CX (including, potentially, with Jenzabar JX). The Presidents agreed. Andrew Dorantes, Mark Ashley and I will all participate heavily in the Strategic Influencer work. Workday will also conduct interviews with different groups of users, starting this week with the Registrars.

So in the near future (July 2015 or soon after) we will gradually bid a fond farewell to OnBase RFCs and the CUC Connect financial reports. And in the medium future (late 2015) the Claremont Colleges will investigate alternatives to Jenzabar CX.
There is a lot more to say about this, and as the Dude said “It’s a complicated case, Maude. Lotta ins. Lotta outs. And a lotta strands to keep in my head, man”. So I will post individual news items on it as we move forward.

Here are a few reminders about IT services for the Spring 2015 Semester.

CIS Help Desk
The Help Desk is located in the Learning Studio on the ground floor of Sprague. The hours are 8am-5pm, including lunch hour. Please send a support request via our request form or send us email at helpdesk@hmc.edu or call us at (909) 607 7777.

Password Resets
The HMC password policy (available at http://goo.gl/pKiHd ) requires a password change once a year and this might be a good time to do it. You can click the “Forgot your password?” link to change your password anytime you are logging in to the HMC Portal or Google Apps. Or you can visit the HMC Password and Account Management Kiosk at https://iam.hmc.edu/identity/self-service/HMC/kiosk.jsf.

Course Mailing Lists
There are several different ways to email the students in your courses. More information about all of that can be found on our Course Mailing Lists page in the CIS Service Catalog at https://www.hmc.edu/cis/services/course-mailing-lists/. MajorDomo course mailing lists have been set up. You can find instructions on how to send email to a course mailing list at http://goo.gl/8ZvhMw as well as a list of all of the Spring 2015 course mailing lists at http://goo.gl/nMUlrc (you must be logged into the HMC Google Apps for Education domain to access these pages).

Course Mudd Shots
Course Mudd Shots have been updated for the semester. They are available at http://www.internal.hmc.edu/dir/courses/. The pages are restricted to the HMC network only, so if you are off-campus or on wireless, please connect to the VPN first.

VPN (Virtual Private Network)
Remember the VPN! It is software that allows you to connect to the HMC network as if you were located on campus. Visit http://vpn.claremont.edu and select the group HMC-LDAP. Log in with your HMC Credentials.

Sakai Updates
Spring 2015 courses have been created and populated with students and faculty. The courses are synchronized with the Jenzabar CX student information system three times per day at 2:30 am, 12:30 pm and 5:30 pm.

Google Apps for Education
Everyone at HMC is entitled to a Google Apps for Education account in our g.hmc.edu domain. Many people have started using the system for email, to share documents or work on them collaboratively. As a reminder, here are the URLs that will take you directly to the HMC single sign in page and then on to the g.hmc.edu domain (without an intermediate Google login page):
http://docs.g.hmc.edu will take you to your google drive document store.
http://mail.g.hmc.edu will take you to email.
http://calendar.g.hmc.edu will take you to the calendar.
http://sites.g.hmc.edu will take you to google sites.

Technology in the Shanahan Learning Center
A separate email has been sent to faculty about technology available in the Shanahan Learning Center and how to request special setups. You can find the text of this information on our news site as well at http://www5.hmc.edu/ITNews/?p=2926.

If you are planning to use only the video projectors or LCD screens in the Shanahan Center this Spring, then read no further. If you are planning to use any other technology you should read on. To request the use of any of the technologies described below please send an email to the CIS Help Desk at helpdesk@hmc.edu or use the AV Request form at http://www.formstack.com/forms/hmc-avrequest.

We ask that you give us at least 48 hours notice when submitting a request. Please do not wait until the last minute to submit requests! We had a bit of a scramble at the beginning of the Fall semester with many last minute requests for clickers, laptops and lecture capture.

Long version:

In addition to the video projectors, LCD TVs (in the 12-person classrooms), speakers and screens, many rooms have resident document cameras, Blu-Ray/DVD or DVD/VHS players. You can find a full list of which rooms have what equipment at this link: http://goo.gl/4Mj1Nx.

We have three carts with 44 laptops, which are stored on the second floor of the Shanahan Center for use throughout the building. If you’d like more information about the laptops and how to reserve them, please visit https://www.hmc.edu/cis/services/laptop-cart-reservation/.

There are six rooms in the Shanahan Center that are lecture capture-ready, including the Lecture Hall (1430), the Recital Hall (B480), the 85 person classroom (B460) and three rooms on the 2nd floor (2450, 2454 and 2460). All of those rooms have a video camera and microphone. You can visit the CIS web site for more information at https://www.hmc.edu/cis/services/classroom-recording-mediasite-lecture-capture/.

Clickers (personal response systems) are also available for loan. At this point all students have purchased iClickers so all you need is a wireless receiver and the iClicker software installed on your computer. We have extra iClickers if you have non-HMC students in your class. More information about the iClickers can be found at https://www.hmc.edu/cis/services/iclickers/.

We have one Smartboard (interactive whiteboard) for faculty to try out. While the Smartboard is on a mobile stand, it is too big and heavy to move between classrooms, so we are currently keeping it in one of the technology-rich classrooms (Shanahan 2460). Use of the Smartboard is on a first come, first served basis so please let us know right away if you would like to try it out in your class, as we may need time to work with the Registrar to reschedule classrooms.

Many faculty also like to be able to project a demonstration or experiment from the front of the room to one of the big screens. The document camera is capable of doing this or you can use a video camera, either one of the built-in video cameras available in the 6 rooms listed above, or CIS can set up one for you.

If you’re interested in using one of these technology services in a class, please submit a request to the CIS Help Desk. You can use our AV request form at http://www.formstack.com/forms/hmc-avrequest or send us an email at helpdesk@hmc.edu.

We ask that you give us at least 48 hours notice when submitting a request. Please do not wait until the last minute to submit requests! We had a bit of a scramble at the beginning of the Fall semester with many last minute requests for clickers, laptops and lecture capture.

October 29th: OpenMP Multithreaded Programming — an easy way to parallelize and speed up your iterative calculations on multi-core machines.

All these workshops are digital badge-earning opportunities. All participants who finish their required work in and out of the workshop will be awarded a digital badge through CIS Digital Badge Pilot program. For more information about digital badges, please see https://www.hmc.edu/cis/digital-badge/.

If you or your children have ever participated in a Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts program, then you’re probably already familiar with the idea of earning badges for learning a new skill or for participating in some sort of activity. Digital badges are very similar. Many educational institutions are using digital badges to recognize activities that are not part of the regular curriculum. For example, at the University of Alaska Anchorage, they have developed a program called EduPass for faculty professional development (http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/academicinnovations/develop/edupass.cfm). The University of Central Florida has a badge program for their student information literacy program (http://infolit.ucf.edu/faculty/badges/).

Digital badges are portable and sharable and function a bit like an electronic portfolio. Badges can be displayed on a variety of platforms, including Credly, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Mozilla Backpack. The Educational Technology Services Group (ETS) has accumulated a number of digital badges this year through attending various Educause and ELI events, as well as through completing an online MOOC on blended learning design. You can view our badges by going to http://www.credly.com/u/jeho and http://www.credly.com/u/elizabeth_hodas.

This Fall the ETS group will be launching a small pilot program where we will begin awarding digital badges to students who attend our Scientific Computing and High Performance Computing workshops. In addition to participating in the workshop, students will need to complete tasks such as completing a short quiz and then writing a program outside of the workshop in order to qualify for a badge. We will be using Credly to create and issue badges. The digital badges are a way to recognize that students have achieved certain levels of competency in areas such as programming with Matlab, Mathematica and R, as well as in using the OpenMP multi-thread programming technique. Students will need to create an account on Credly in order to accept the badge, and can then display the badge on the platforms mentioned above.

Who will want to see these digital badges? Faculty, peers and even prospective employers can look at a student’s digital badges and get a sense of a student’s accomplishments outside the classroom. Each badge contains a description of what criteria the student had to meet in order to earn the badge as well as a link back to the evidence submitted by the student.

While we’re starting out on a small scale with this pilot, we can imagine many other areas where digital badges could be used, such as in our faculty development program and possibly in other administrative departments on campus.